Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday April 02, 2008 @10:16PM
from the mother-of-all-disaster-movies dept.

BigBadBus writes "The BBC is reporting that NASA's twin spacecraft designed to obtain stereo images of the Sun have recorded a Solar Tsunami. The feature includes a fascinating movie of the images captured."

What would it sound like, anyway? It's a pressure wave, aka a sound wave (mostly, there's apparently magnetic effects involved too), but really loud. Really, really loud. But, that sharp rise and fall in pressure has a definable sound to it. I'm sure someone will do a better job than I can, but I think it would sound a lot like a "pop" but with tonality to it -- it's not a sharp-edged delta function, but rather a bandpass-filtered version of one. It looks from the scale, though, like it's a very low frequency wave -- well into the subsonic regime. You wouldn't so much hear it or even feel it as get blown back and forth by it. Well, neglecting that detail about the energy levels involved. Suffice to say that overpowered stereo your neighbor has wouldn't come close...

You know, when you turn a seismogram into sound and speed it up, it sounds pretty much like rubbing two rocks against each other. That sort of event usually sounding the way you'd expect them to once you speed it up enough, I'd say this solar Tsunami must sound like the type of explosion you'd expect to hear.

Since the sun does not have air (all substances are torn-apart and exist only as plasma), there would be no sound. If you tried to dip a microphone into the sun and record it, you'd just have a vaporized microphone.

The solar wind has a pressure, and you can measure it. And it changes. You could interpret that pressure as sound. It would be quiet by terrestrial standards, but an event like this would definitely make noise.

Of course, your microphone wouldn't bear much resemblance to a terrestrial one; measuring pressures that low is a tricky thing.

Huh? We're talking about measuring the solar wind, ie interplanetary vacuum. As in, positioned at a distance comparable to Earth's orbit. The instrument in question would be more like a particle detector than a microphone or pressure gauge. (IANA astrophysicist.)

If only we were that lucky. This was the clearly work of Galactus. He probably got tired of his herald making jokes about that big jug head of his and tossed his silver ass into the sun at about half the speed of light. Surf this, jerk.

I assume you are referring to the Asian tsunami. The problem wasn't that we couldn't find it in time, but that the warning systems were not in place to alert people once this information was known. This is not a breakdown of science, but of government.

That movie is pretty cool, but only if you use a lot of imagination, which defeats the point of the movie (except for scientists).

I always like movies of the Sun a lot better when they accurately show how gauzy the Sun actually is, because it's really a ball of gas, not as solid as pictures like that show. Some color, and some of the stars beyond shining through, all make these movies of the Sun hanging in space look a lot cooler, and a lot less like peering through a microscope.

I'm the same way. One of the things that gives me pause is when a publication states that something is "hotter than the surface of the sun."

I always ask myself a question whenever I read or hear that line: what surface? Where the heck do you define the "surface" in the case of a star?

I assume that somewhere at the sun's core you've got some type of phenomenally wacky material, and from there on out you're just looking at an energized soupy plasma that just gets progressively less and less dense. Even if you get to some point where somebody decides the pressure suddenly becomes worthy of "surface" status, it's still not going to be anything like a surface in the minds of most normal humans. The "surface" is roiling, boiling, and exploding with astronomical energies non-stop. That seems to me like trying to describe an exploding can of aerosol cheese as a cohesive solid, and I dare say we all know from experience how ridiculous that would be.

To me, referring to the surface of the sun seems akin to invoking the question, "what's the length of the coastline of England?" My answer would be, "on what scale?" But I seem to be the only one who feels that way, so perhaps I'm just in the dark over something. Has someone figured out some cool relationship between the gravitational ability of the sun to hold on to its own matter compared with the average energy of a certain layer of plasma or something? I don't know. I never hear it talked about. All I ever hear is that simple phrase, "the surface of the sun," used in article after article... like it's so damn obvious and how much of a moron I must be to stumble over it every time.

Sometimes I suspect that someone, somewhere, with god-like precision simply declared one day, "no, this distance outward from the core represents the surface, and fuck you if you doubt me".

Photons which are generated at the core of the sun, where fusion is occurring, can take tens or hundreds of millions of years to reach the surface (and by that time, they have been thermally absorbed and re-emitted so many times it's hard to even call them the same photons). It might be a big ball of gas, but star matter is also one of the most opaque substances commonly occurring in the universe, due to the enormous density.

While you're right about the Sun's surface being a largely statistical boundary, and not at some specific radius like on a solid planet (which is also an approximately fractal distance, as your coastline example suggests), and not at all like the oversimplifications often pictured and vaguely described, there is such a thing. It's a chaotic surface, like a stormy sea, but there is a boundary where the Sun's plasma meets the vacuum of space, into which the Sun blasts solar wind (including protons, electron/b

It occurs to me that what you're describing is very much like the concept of "sea level." There's no such thing, of course -- at any point on any coast, the water level is constantly changing as waves come in; on a smaller level, the air above the water is always filled with spray while the water near the surface is filled with bubbles. And yet we have no problem averaging all this out and coming up with a measurement for sea level that's precisely defined down to (at least) the level of a foot. So if yo

Hmm...while, yes, the sun is (mostly) made up of gasses, it is still very dense, so I don't know that 'gauzy' is the right word. It's dense enough for fusion to take place in the core, and for the photons that are the energy thus released to take thousands of years to reach the surface. Not solid, but certainly no morning fog, either.The little bit you might be able to see through is just the very upper atmosphere (probably gaps under prominences and CMEs), and the best views of that kind of stuff aren't

Because there's no way stars can shine through the Sun. Direct from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

The solar interior is not directly observable, and the Sun itself is opaque to electromagnetic radiation.

Still don't believe me? Take a look at this video [nasa.gov]. It clearly shows that there are no "stars" initially, but after the flare reaches the satellite, the "stars" suddenly appear. (SOHO is the satellite, the instrument is the EIT, or Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope)

You need to improve your reading skills; nowhere in my post did I use the word "solid", or any synonym thereof. (That meant "or any word that means the same thing as solid", in case you were confused.)

Well, I have indeed looked at the Sun, and I'm not even blind because I've been careful to look away in time.But if you've looked at the Sun, you know that it doesn't look like the "tsunami" video we're discussing, either. And though the Sun is lots brighter than the other stars it hangs in front of, the instruments we're using don't have to constrain their images to the "windowing" effect our eyes give us. We can take pictures of other stars in a daylight sky with our instruments without the Sun blotting t

I found it easier to see threads of comments with the old version. The indentation used on this page appears to be about 10 pixels, which when the parent is collapsed and not wrapping the child in its border isn't enough for me to easily distinguish. It's better than the first AJAX-enabled version, but I would prefer to have the older, green, style's indentation.

Gonna have to disagree with you. I like it a lot, though I would have used a single-pixel border and square buttons, just to save on vertical space. But a visual manifestation of the way comments relate to each other is a welcome change!

And, it also appears to be AJAX-driven, which makes it fully buzzword-compliant.

I got them too. At first I thought that the boxes were cool because it would help find the parent threads, but that just isn't the case. If the old discussion system was akin to block separation by indentation (python), then the new system is akin to XML's close-tag requirement. In other words, visually messy and confusing. Maybe if the blocks were colour coded for depth it would be easier, but I find myself doubting that as I type it.And I do like the "you must preview before you post" requirement, as/. d

This might be an event on some otherwise quiet planet. But given the Sun itself is a gigantic ball of freakin' fire, with solar flares and enough UV to cause cancer in people on other planets, a bit of a wave doesn't seem quite as impressive.

FTA: "However, it was not exactly the same, Dr Gallagher added, because on the Sun, magnetic fields also helped the waves along. The phenomenon is therefore known as a magneto-acoustic wave.
so your name should be something to do with magneto-acoustic waves... Magnecoustami sounds a bit lame, maybe someone else can come up with one better...

If you had put this in you wouldn't have these issues. Sunspot interference is turned on by default. But after you disable it, the case acts like a Faraday Cage so you won't have to worry about pesky radiation interfering with your lan/wan operations.

In reality though, I suppose Cisco equipment does have some stuff enabled yet not configured by default that I would rather it not.

Freaking tsunami of fire!? That is the most awesome thing I've ever heard of. If I don't see a movie in the next two years with a kick-ass tsunami of fire clobbering people... I'm going to be really sad. Steven Spielberg - this is right up your alley. I'm counting on you.

P.S. Don't try and give me some fireball or some weak wave crap either. I want to see a tsunami of fire roll over a city. That is win.